Orthodox Worldview and CS Lewis

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Herman Middleton first appeared in Road to Emmausin Winter 2003, when he described his life as a theol-ogy student in Thessalonica, Greece.1 Since then, hehas received his Master’s Degree and published whathas quickly become an English-language Orthodoxclassic, “Precious Vessels of the Holy Spirit” – shortlives and excerpts from the writings of contemporaryGreek spiritual fathers. Herman is now completing hisdoctoral dissertation on C.S. Lewis and OrthodoxChristianity, and has generously agreed to share hisinsights on this remarkable 20th-century Christian.

RTE: Herman, it’s good to have you back. You received your B.A. fromWheaton College in Illinois, and now, after a decade in Greece, you’ve finished your education. How did you decide on C. S. Lewis as the subjectof your Greek dissertation?

HERMAN: Initially, I’d thought of two other dissertation topics, one dealingwith St. Theodore the Studite on the source of authority in the Church, andthe other on Fr. Sophrony Sakharov’s gnosiology (theory of knowledge), but I finally decided I wanted to do something that more than five or tenpeople in Greece would end up reading, something that would be useful andthat I would enjoy working on afterwards.

At that point C.S. Lewis leapt to mind. Many people have come toOrthodoxy through Lewis, or at least credited him with help along the way.He is undoubtedly one of the most influential Christian writers of the 20thcentury, and there hadn’t been an in-depth study of him done from anOrthodox perspective. People don’t think of him as a theologian, but he’shad a greater influence than most 20th-century theologians who wrote moreesoteric books that were read by far fewer people. I felt it was important thatOrthodox (especially Orthodox in the West) know what he wrote and wherehe was coming from.

AN “OLD WESTERN MAN”:

C.S. LEWIS IN LIGHT OF ORTHODOX

CHRISTIANITY Opposite: Framed photo of C.S. Lewis from The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, where Lewisoften met with friends.

1 “Living Theology in Thessalonica,” Road to Emmaus, #12, Winter 2003.

Road to Emmaus Vol. VIII, No. 1 (#28)

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AN “OLD WESTERN MAN”

didn’t have a clear-cut tradition – Anglican tradition is very broad. But whatkept him small-“o” orthodox to the Christian tradition was his faith, and hisdedication to prayer and reading Scripture. His desire to understandScripture was incredibly sincere. The fact that he hadn’t been trained theologically was actually a benefit because he didn’t come to the debatewith preconceived notions; he wasn’t dedicated to a system of thought.

Most of Lewis’s arguments are focused on overcoming prejudice byaddressing intellectual obstacles to faith. Lewis would say, “I’m not tryingto dogmatize, I’m trying to create room for a healthy agnosticism.” Just asChristians often dogmatize, atheists also dogmatize their disbelief, and hetried to counter this by saying, “You say this, but you actually don’t have afoundation. This is just supposition.”

Nevertheless, although he says that Christianity can be defended intellec-tually, it wasn’t logical arguments that finally brought him to faith. He described himself as the most reluctant convert in England.

RTE: Yes, it was an experience of God that led him to Christianity, and hisintellectual training that allowed him to articulate his belief. How close doeshis writing resonate with Orthodoxy?

HERMAN: For the most part, I find that he is very close to Orthodoxy, especially when he bases his writing on his own study of Scripture and hisprayer life, which was that of a pious dedicated Christian who wanted toknow the meaning of the Incarnation. Through this honest search, he cameto many positions that the Orthodox Fathers hold as well.

Lewis often focused on modern questions, particularly the relationshipbetween Christianity and culture, something that modern Orthodox theolo-gians haven’t really dealt with yet. He wrote wonderful essays on Christianity and culture and on ethical issues, and he foresaw the pathmodern science is taking. These are all things that Orthodox people can useand benefit from by reading him.

Lewis deals with real situations and real issues. This isn’t to say that fourth-century Christology, for example, is irrelevant, but you have to apply it, andthat isn’t done enough today. Also, in Greek we would say that Lewis eixeperiexomeno, that is, “had content.” He was a man who had had a certainamount of spiritual experience and could speak with a certain authority.

RTE: What would you call “the best of Lewis”?

RTE: I’ve heard Orthodox converts ask whetherthey can still read Lewis, as if it is somehow back-peddling.

HERMAN: Or people say, “I do love him, and whatdoes that say about Orthodoxy?” It’s the samequestion we ask about other pious, faithfulChristians who do not belong to the OrthodoxChurch. “Where do we place them? How do wethink about this?”

What we can say is that there is a differencebetween being inside the Orthodox Church andbeing outside of the Orthodox Church. This does-

n’t reflect on the merit of the person, but on the grace of the Church throughthe sacraments. The other thing is that when you look at Lewis’s writing, youcan say, “This is wonderful,” “He’s got it here,” or “This is problematic.” Youaren’t making judgements about him, you’re evaluating aspects of hisunderstanding in light of Orthodox belief. St. Gregory Palamas talks abouthow, in the rhetoric of defending the faith, there is sometimes room for alack of precision – not flexibility, but a certain imprecision.

RTE: That you can over- or underemphasize a point in order to get it across?

HERMAN: Yes. And also in the heat of argument, when you are trying to getat something and it’s still not clear. This is how I’ve always felt about Fr. Seraphim Rose’s writings; it’s having a “gut” sense of theology. The Church only clarifies things when it is absolutely necessary. It doesn’tgo around creating theoretical problems or theoretical ideas.

Also, Lewis was dealing with the modern world in a way that I haven’tseen many people attempt. He saw himself as an apologist to the modernsceptic. He dealt mostly with criticisms of Christianity, which he showed tobe prejudices rather than logically reasoned arguments. He was at Oxfordwith, among others, some incredibly intelligent atheists who were attackingChristianity on many fronts, and he tried to provide a defense of Christianityin the face of modern scepticism. In the heat of that debate, he wasn’t alwayscompletely clear, and this was largely because he didn’t have the necessarydogmatic foundation.

In a way, that was just as well, because he belonged to a church that

Herman Middleton

inside. In the West, especially in the academic world, objectivity is held upas the ideal. The idea of objectivity is that you can step outside and look atsomething as an object, while in the Christian life, you can’t really do that.

Fr. Sophrony Sakharov talks about God as being “Who” as opposed to“What.” His point is that God is a Person with whom you have a relationship;He is not an abstract idea that can be observed. There has been a kind ofmyth that we can be objective, that we must strive for objectivity so that wedon’t bring in our own prejudices, but this is impossible. If you are there,you bring who you are. You just need to be honest about what that is.

Actually, contemporary theories of knowledge now suggest that there isreally no way you can divorce yourself from the object. The object perceivedis influenced by the person looking. This is a new approach in the hard sciences that takes into consideration the fact that the object has a subject.Perfect objectivity is a myth.

So in The Screwtape Letters, Lewis was saying, “Anything that is true inThe Screwtape Letters is a result of being able to see into my own heart. I can see the evil there and the things I am struggling with, and that isenough to teach me.” This is how the Fathers wrote, out of their experience.

Otherwise, I can’t really explain why he ended up being so Orthodox. He is very faithful to the biblical witness. He had real problems withProtestant ideas such as Calvinism’s understanding of the depravity of man,for example, because there is so much in Scripture that talks about man’sresponsibility. If man is completely depraved, how could he possibly beresponsible? So, from a scriptural perspective, it is remarkable how capableLewis is of keeping seemingly contradictory things in balance.

Thin Ice, “Supposal,” and Seeds of Divine Longing

RTE: And what do you see as Lewis’s weak points?

HERMAN: Lewis was essentially an experiential theologian as opposed to anintellectual or speculative theologian. Problems arise when he becomesspeculative. Especially in the West, divergence from tradition often camefrom this very speculative, intellectual approach to Christianity and thescriptures, rather than dealing with actual problems, which is what theFathers of the Church did in the Councils.

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HERMAN: I would most enjoy rereading his essays. As far as his books go,Miracles is quite heavy going. Mere Christianity is much more accessible.The Problem of Pain was one of his earliest works, and that is part of thereason there are some problems in it.

The Great Divorce is one of his most interesting novels. Reading it, I began to grasp what the Catholics were struggling to understand with theidea of purgatory. It’s a legitimate question, although not one we shouldspend too much time thinking about because the details of how humansouls pass on to God are a mystery and in this earthly life we won’t everknow exactly how it works out, but somehow the human soul is increasinglypurified and goes from “glory to glory.” But if we aren’t at a level of perfectedholiness when we die – which we never will be as there is a constant growth– what does this mean, especially if we die as sinners and spiritually imma-ture souls? Lewis does not deal with any of this in a dogmatic way, but heprovides an arena for asking pertinent questions.

Out of all of his books, perhaps The Screwtape Letters is the most usefuland spiritually edifying. He hits on many things that are universally true,and Orthodox can definitely benefit here from being kicked (spiritually) inthe backside a bit, along with everyone else. How did he get so many thingsright? Lewis begins to answer this question in the Preface to the book:

Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing thatmy Letters were the ripe fruit of many years’ study in moral andascetic theology. They forget that there is an equally reliable,though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. ‘My heart’ – I need no other’s – ‘showeth me the wickedness of the ungodly.’

While from an Orthodox perspective this would seem like a natural thingto say, I get the feeling that in the milieu he was living in at Oxford, it wouldactually have been a very humble thing for him to say. In the world that he lived in one wouldn’t base the things that one wrote on one’s own expe-rience. You would base them on research, your intellectual understandingof other texts. His point was that in the spiritual life you can learn a lot justliving and struggling as a Christian.

Orthodoxy, true Christianity, is always very subjective. You aren’t dissecting things from the outside, you are attentive to what is going on


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A discussion on this arose between him and a Dr. Joad, head of theDepartment of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Dr. Joad was an agnostic on the verge of conversion who responded, “I appreciate what you are doing, but the image of a monkey being temptedby Satan is a little too much for me.” Lewis apologized, and said that thatwasn’t the image he had wanted to give, and that an animal fall probablywould have taken on a different form. So, he basically got into some verymurky water here based on this presupposition. What makes things evenmore unclear is that in other places he explicitly rejects evolution.

RTE: He rejects it even as a complement of theistic design?

HERMAN: He talks about the “spirit of evolution” prior to Darwin and men-tions two pre-Darwinian literary expressions of an evolutionary world-view:Nibelung’s Ring and Keat’s Hyperion. Lewis arguedthat Darwin was living in an era when this idea wasin the air and because he went out looking for evidence for it, it wasn’t surprising that he found it. In speaking of the appeal of evolution, Lewis said,“the mythology of evolution is very powerful. It hasalways taken hold of me and rung true in my deep-est being, and it continues to do so. It appeals toevery part of me except for my mind, and so Ibelieve it no longer.”

RTE: Have you found other troublesome areas?

HERMAN: Other problems include several points that Bishop Kallistos Ware(who is very appreciative of Lewis in general) has addressed, including theabsence of Trinitarian theology in The Chronicles of Narnia. In fact, Lewisdoesn’t talk a great deal about the Holy Trinity or about the Holy Spirit inany of his writings. He holds to the doctrine of the Trinity as any traditionalAnglican would, but that hasn’t translated to his writings.

If you look at the Holy Fathers of the first and second century, they didn’thave a developed theology of the Holy Spirit. They had a living experience ofthe Holy Spirit in their lives, but they didn’t write about Him and it wasn’tclarified until the fourth century when heresies began springing up regardingthe nature of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

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That said, I do feel that Lewis wasn’t speculating for the sake of speculation.He didn’t take it upon himself to write theology; opportunities came to him.People asked him to write articles, give radio talks, and so on. He felt thatwhat he could offer was to help make Christianity a viable option for the modern sceptic. When he does speculate, it is always out of a desire toprovide an apologetic and to encourage a certain “agnosticism” in scientistsand atheists towards their own disbelief, so that the foundations of disbeliefcan be called into question. But, not having a formal foundation ofOrthodoxy and the Church Fathers, he sometimes finds himself on thin ice.

The most obvious example of this is in The Problem of Pain, where hetries to deal with one of the most serious modern objections to Christianity:“How could an all-powerful and all-good God allow His creation to suffer?”

Addressing the problem of pain wasn’t something unique to Lewis. Hisand Christianity’s answer is that ultimately pain and the possibility of painin the fallen world is necessary because of the existence of human freedom.He goes so far as to provide vivid examples of a world that wouldn’t allowhuman freedom in order to avoid pain and how problematic that would beon a spiritual level.

In a particularly problematic section of The Problem of Pain, Lewis speculates regarding the nature of animal pain: “Now that we know thatcarnivorousness existed before humans and was obviously a fall from anideal, there must have been evil before Adam and perhaps we can speculatea fall of animals.” This is a great idea if you agree with evolutionary cosmology, but otherwise it creates a great many other questions and quitefrankly, the Pauline and biblical understanding of the fall of man is thatthrough man’s fall, all of nature fell.

Now, what does that really mean for Lewis? If, by the end of his life he hadseen this passage as problematic, it seems reasonable that he would havedone a revision, but perhaps he felt that because he had presented it asspeculation, it was unnecessary to return to it.

This is one of the areas in which I’m still struggling to understand Lewis:his views on evolution. I’ve spoken to a number of people who have studiedLewis longer than I have and they essentially agree that he was a “theisticevolutionist,” that is, he accepted the basic Darwinian view, but with theguidance of an intelligent designer; that evolution was God’s way of creat-ing the world.


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There’s no question that he accepted the Holy Trinity. Bishop Kallistos’concern here was that if The Chronicles of Narnia were supposed to be aChristian allegory, there wasn’t a Trinitarian dimension. One answer to thisis that Lewis spoke of The Chronicles not as an allegory, but more like a“supposal,” where you don’t take anything as a direct allegory.

He wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for his goddaughter,Lucy Barfield, and the rest of The Chronicles of Narnia came as a sort ofafterthought. His children’s fiction grew out of a love of story and it was perhaps inevitable that such a devoted Christian and gifted writer wouldinclude a great deal of Christian imagery and mythology. I don’t think hewrote the books as an intentional teaching device, but considering who hewas – an apologist, a Christian, a teacher – perhaps it was inevitable that itwould come out that way.

Throughout The Chronicles, and especially in The Last Battle, Lewis plantsseeds of divine longing in his readers’ hearts, to awaken the desire to experi-ence their own resurrection. This is where he comes closest to Orthodoxy. Heunderstands that people are converted ultimately through their hearts, andthat if seed falls on good ground, it will be nurtured by grace.

RTE: When you read Lewis’s essays, you realize that he wrote for a very largeaudience: students, academics, clergy, village parishioners, young soldiers,as well as millions of listeners to his radio broadcasts.

HERMAN: Yes, and because of this, he was charged with anti-intellectualism.There is a book, C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, written byJohn Beversluis, a professor of philosophy at Indiana University, who triesto debunk Lewis’s arguments philosophically, based on logic. His main thesis is that Lewis was dishonest, because for him all that mattered wasthat people converted to Christianity. Because Lewis already believed inChristianity, it didn’t ultimately matter to him that his arguments were logically well-founded; all that mattered was that they worked, that theywere effective. But maybe one can say this is Beversluis’ problem. From hisbook it seems that he is probably an atheist, and his religion is logic.

I mention this because Lewis tried to provide intellectual arguments for both the university academic and the common man, because the common man had also bought into modern atheistic thinking, much that,

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Opposite: The Kilns, C.S. Lewis’s home in Oxford at Headington Quarry.

At the service, he would wonder, “What has changed this week, what is the priest going to do now?” Liturgical renewal was something that manywestern churches were going through that didn’t happen in Orthodoxy.Lewis felt that the ideal is for the liturgy to stay the same and for you to become so familiar with it that you just pray through it. It’s a sacred structure for the Holy Spirit to work through, and he recognized that.

RTE: Was he ever exposed to Orthodox practice?

HERMAN: Again, in Letters to Malcolm, Lewis refers to his experiences at anOrthodox liturgy: “What pleased me most about a Greek Orthodox mass I once attended was that there seemed to be no prescribed behaviour for thecongregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked; one crawledabout the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody tookthe slightest notice of what anyone else was doing.”2

Also there was great hope until the ‘50’s that there would be a reconciliationbetween the Anglicans and the Orthodox. Talks with the Anglicans werequite advanced. We know that Lewis did give at least one talk to anOrthodox group, which was sponsored by Sobornost. Unfortunately, thistalk was lost and there is no transcript. It was called something like, “An Icon, a Toy, and a Soldier.”

I also suspect that Lewis felt that interchurch relations wasn’t his forum.There were representatives of his own church doing this, and he felt that wastheir role. He always felt a little ill-equipped to do what he was doing withapologetics because he hadn’t been trained, but at the same time, God wasproviding him with these opportunities.

RTE: How familiar was he with the Church Fathers?

HERMAN: We know that he read St. Athanasius on the Incarnation. He refersto St. Gregory the Great, to Origen, to St. Irenaeus and to St. JohnChrysostom (although through a German commentator). He had a greatrespect for the Fathers, and an acute sense of tradition, but he didn’t regardhimself as a theologian so he didn’t spend time developing his knowledge inthat area. He had a great many professional and domestic responsibilitiesand very little “free time” to do the kind of intensive study that would havedemanded.

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Lewis argued, is essentially prejudiced. Lewis was a gifted rhetorician: his works are often very convincing.

Lewis and Orthodoxy

RTE: In returning to aspects of Lewis’s writing that are problematic forOrthodox, did he disagree with the Orthodox and Catholic veneration of theMother of God and the saints, or did he simply not discuss it as a part of hisstance of “mere Christianity?” In his writing, he honors their historicalroles, but seems to stop there.

HERMAN: He would have said, “I don’t see my job as healing the divisions ofthe Church, although that’s very important.” This was why he didn’t dealwith divisive issues, or with certain aspects of Scripture. He knew where hisstrengths as a Christian apologist lay and how best to use them. His idea ofmere Christianity was that there is a foundation of Christianity that allChristians accept. Of course, as a Catholic student of his said, mereChristianity for Lewis as a Protestant is one thing, but for a Roman Catholic(and we would say, for Orthodox) mere Christianity is something else. It nec-essarily includes the active veneration of the Mother of God and of the saints.

Along the same lines, another difference between Lewis and Orthodoxy isthat the Orthodox have a much clearer understanding of the significance ofliturgy to the life of the Church than Lewis did. Lewis certainly believed inthe spiritual reality of the sacraments, and he attended church frequently,but his attitude toward the Anglican services seemed, to a certain extent,ambivalent. He makes it very clear that he didn’t like Anglican hymn-singing. He did believe it was important for people to worship together; he was obedient to church tradition and faithful to his duty as a Christian.It’s difficult to pin Lewis down sometimes…there are so many seeminglydisparate aspects to his thought that it’s not easy to figure out exactly wherehe stood on some matters. What we can say with certainty, however, is thathe had a very regular daily schedule, almost monastic in its rhythm: at 8 a.m. he said morning prayers, at 9 a.m. he was usually found in churchfor matins, and on Sundays he also attended liturgy.

He also made some remarks about liturgics that Orthodox could agreewith. One of these was in his last book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly onPrayer, when, during a time of increasing Anglican liturgical reform, hewrote about how he disliked the continual small changes in the liturgy.


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2 Lewis, C. S. Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer, New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1964,pg. 10.

to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself –to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed, and then to find yourself still in bed.”3

Lewis was very aware of the power of the imagination and of man’s ability to fool himself, and he was always suspicious of this spiritualizing ofthe intellect and of creativity. He realized that real spiritual faith, realgrowth, is something that is much more tangible and real. You don’t read a book about overcoming anger and then pass a theoretical exam. You workat it. It’s a process.

You get intimations of this in The Screwtape Letters. The demon uncle tellshis student nephew something like, “Focus your patient’s attention on thoselofty values of goodness and peace. Make them weep about a person who hasbeen killed in war, and then turn around and bite the head off his neighbor.When it comes down to real brass tacks, something that would improve hisrelationship with his neighbor, have him focus on these other ideas.”

RTE: Lewis died in 1963. If he had lived another few decades, how do youthink he would have responded to the changes in the Anglican Church?

HERMAN: I’m not sure he could have stayed where he was, based on what hashappened in the Anglican Church. One interesting example of his traditionalviews was when the first woman was ordained as a priest in the Anglicancommunion in Hong Kong in 1944. Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers asking if she would write to the newspaper about it, as he didn’t feel that hecould do so as credibly because he was a man. Dorothy Sayers replied thatshe didn’t really see it as a theological problem, and she never wrote the letter. Lewis, however, did end up writing about this issue, and it shows hisconcern for the way things were going.

RTE: He has interesting ideas on men, women, and relationships in general.For example, in one of his essays or letters, he talks about the confusionbetween the sexes that results from the word “unselfish.” Men, he says, mostoften use “unselfish” to mean not being a bother to others, while women useit to mean going out of one’s way to do something for someone else.

For me, one of his most interesting passages on relationship is in ThatHideous Strength. Jane Studdock, one of the main characters, is a modern

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RTE: What is the importance of Lewis for an Orthodox reader? It’s naturalthat western Christians would have read him, but there is also growinginterest in him in Russia, Greece, and Eastern Europe.

HERMAN: I recently spoke to a young Greek-American man who creditsLewis with saving his Orthodoxy precisely because Lewis dealt with moderncriticisms of Christianity as an apologist. For some Orthodox I think he isvery, very valuable. Because he is careful not to promote his affiliation withthe Anglican Communion, he can actually be used more easily than otherwriters. Perhaps his most significant contribution is his interaction withmodern western problems, which, as I said, we Orthodox haven’t reallydealt with sufficiently.

Christianity and Culture

After the Reformation there was an increasing emphasis upon the intellect in the West, and a stepping away from church tradition andscriptural authority, and odd ideas crept in under the guise of Christianity.In his essay, “Christianity and Culture,” Lewis criticizes the confusion of theaesthetic with the spiritual that began in the nineteenth century (so heargues) in the English language with Matthew Arnold’s use of the Englishword spiritual with the meaning of the German word geistlich. When Arnoldused the word “spiritual” to speak of art, he displaced the traditional idea ofhuman spirituality. Man’s essence no longer had to be bound to religion; it could now be attributed to his “creative powers” – art, aesthetics, andhigher feelings.

Lewis’s point was that the aesthetician, the culturally sensitive man, isreally no more religious than the truck driver. They both do their work. If they do their work well, it is pleasing to the Lord because it is done for Him, in a manner that is pleasing to Him. Their spirituality is bound toreligious practice, not to aesthetic or cultural values. Higher culture has anallure. As an undergraduate at Wheaton College, I remember buying intothe idea that artistic and cultural pursuits are somehow inherently spiritual.

In a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 15 June 1920, Lewis wrote:“We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that,because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalledto see how much of the change which I thought I had undergone lately wasonly imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy


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3 Lewis, C.S., The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. I: Family Letters 1905-1931, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004, pg. 906.

that God doesn’t exist, or if He does, He is like a robot, or we are like robots;we are caught in a matrix. But Lewis’s depiction of a Christian Merlin, awakened for a last battle against the forces of evil, is very appealing becausehe is somehow that medieval man with his natural faculties intact, unfrag-mented. Merlin is not made into a saint, but his innocence has not beencompletely lost. He is portrayed as a Christian who, in his own time, consciously participated in nature. All of us have had some moments in our lives when we felt at one with the nature around us, but that continualuninterrupted, integral humanness is a wonderful image.

Many Orthodox feel close to Lewis because he is like a pre-modern. He identified himself as an “old western man,” and he tried to reach back tothe mindset of pre-Enlightenment humanity. He was a great critic of theEnlightenment and the Renaissance and identified himself with the medievalworld, a world still very close to Orthodoxy. With the Enlightenment, howev-er, objectivity became an absolute. Fr. Sophrony Sakharov said that there isnothing so negative as the idea of Truth as “What.” Truth is never “What,”Truth is always “Who.” If it is something you can touch and evaluate, you cando so only because it is dead. Objective truth is dead, whereas a subjectivetruth is something you are in relationship with.

Although modern Greeks and Russians may not have treated creation asthey should, as their theology teaches them, theologically there is a place inOrthodoxy for a responsible attitude towards creation, while in the West wehave often developed an antagonism toward creation. Man versus nature,reason versus faith. Greece didn’t go through a Reformation or anEnlightenment. They never burned scientists because they seemed to becontradicting the Christian world-view. In Lewis’s writings, fictionalizedcharacters like a Christianized Merlin are used to embody that earlier andmore cohesive world-view.

RTE: From what I remember, he saw social action as an integral part of aChristian’s response to the goodness of the created world. For instance,ecology wasn’t only for nature’s sake, it was reverencing God’s whole plan of creation.

HERMAN: Definitely. In fact, there are aspects of Lewis’s theology andapproach to Christianity that echo an Orthodox understanding of creationthat is seldom encountered in the West. In fact, in his celebrated sermon,

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agnostic graduate student, unhappily married to Mark, an ambitious younguniversity lecturer. She is speaking here with Ransom, the director of thesmall Christian fellowship she happens onto:

“I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.” The Director saidnothing. “What would you, what would the people you are talkingabout say about a case like that?” “I will tell you if you really want toknow,” said the Director. “Please,” said Jane reluctantly. “Theywould say,” he answered, “that you do not fail in obedience throughlack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedi-ence.” Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to sucha remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance…

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companion-ship.” “Ah, equality,” said the Director, “we must talk about someother time. Yes, we all must be guarded by equal rights from oneanother’s greed because we are fallen, just as we must all wear clothesfor the same reason … Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

“I always thought that was just what it was, I thought that it wasin their souls where people were equal.” “You were mistaken,” saidhe gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equalitybefore the law, equality of incomes, that is all very well. Equalityguards life, it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food.”4

HERMAN: Yes, each one is given his own equality, but there is perfect naturalequality only when there is perfect love. Equality in this world is one of thelaws that keeps us from devouring one another.

RTE: Another interesting idea, and this is an echo of St. Paul, is that sub-mission in marriage is just a small earthly reflection of the much deeperpersonal surrender that faith requires.

HERMAN: Yes, and Lewis is also getting at the idea of us being the “sons ofAdam and daughters of Eve,” that if we go back far enough, we spring fromone root. Like most modern people, Jane and Mark have no sense of this.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis portrays untamed nature, untamed creation, in a Christian context. The modern world in particular has tried tobox the world into categories, and we are suffocating. People feel cornered,


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4 Lewis, C.S., That Hideous Strength, New York, NY: MacMillan Publishing, 1977, pg. 147-148.

“The Weight of Glory,” Lewis actually speaks of the presence of God’s energiesworking through creation:

We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, intothat splendour which she fitfully reflects.

And in there, beyond Nature, we shall eat of the tree of life. At present, if we are reborn in Christ, the spirit in us lives directlyon God; but the mind and still more the body, receives life fromHim at a thousand removes – through our ancestors, through ourfood, through the elements. The faint, far-off results of those energies which God’s creative rapture implanted in matter whenHe made the worlds are what we now call physical pleasures; andeven thus filtered, they are too much for our present management.What would it be to taste at the fountain-head that stream of whicheven these lower reaches prove so intoxicating? Yet that, I believe,is what lies before us. The whole man is to drink joy from the foun-tain of joy. As St. Augustine said, the rapture of the saved soul will“flow over” into the glorified body. In the light of our present specialized and depraved appetites we cannot imagine this torrensvoluptatis, and I warn everyone most seriously not to try.

Again, I should emphasize that Lewis’s theology is at the level of gut-feeling,an intuitive sense of truth. His theological language is imprecise at best and certainly does not provide an adequate theological understanding ofcreation as found in patristic cosmology.

Lewis’s Fictional Works

RTE: Can we talk now about Lewis’s fiction: The Chronicles of Narnia; hisspace trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That HideousStrength; and Till We Have Faces?

HERMAN: I find that much of his fiction lacks the richness of detail of J.R.R.Tolkien’s works. The volumes that make up The Chronicles of Narnia areshort and aren’t really enough to thoroughly develop Narnia. That said, he tells a very entertaining story, and of course, the first book, The Lion theWitch and the Wardrobe, is full of Christian allegory (even though he would


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Opposite: Holy Trinity Church where Lewis worshipped and is buried.

But where Tolkien really differs from Lewis is in this sense of divine inspi-ration in creative work. He felt that there was too much rationality, too muchof Lewis in The Chronicles, and that this destroyed something. Of course, thisisn’t black and white. He supported much of what Lewis did, and Lewis, in turn, speaks of divine inspiration in art, but in a less direct way.

Lewis felt that the artist and the charwoman’s work were equal in the sight of God if both were done for Him and that, in a sense, culture is onlynecessary for those who aren’t simple enough. There is a much faster, safer,and more sure way to Christ that many pious souls have followed for gener-ations, and that is the way of simple faith. Art and culture are props thatsophisticated people need to get to the point where these simple souls start,which is faith in Christ.

RTE: But Lewis would be the first to admit that we aren’t simply spiritualizedbeings, and if we can’t fill our senses with beautiful things, we will fill themwith ugly ones. If we don’t cultivate beauty, even on a natural level, we descend to something less. I suspect that someone who is spirituallyadvanced might appreciate art, music, and literature even more deeply thanthe average person, but he wouldn’t try to use it as spiritual food.

HERMAN: Of course, and we can receive a mistaken impression of saintsfrom hagiography. We may make the mistake of thinking that they are all basically alike, and very different from us. In the lives of contemporaryspiritual fathers of Greece, we see how unique each one was, and howhuman. For example, in his later years, Father Porphyrios of Athens begantaking piano lessons, simply because he loved music.

But for Lewis, the most valuable thing was to plant these seeds of aChristian mythology that could eventually bear fruit. He wanted people tolook through the image he was trying to create to the prototype. Also, he wasinterested in his fiction as a story and he wanted people to approach it aschildren approach it.

RTE: Some of the Church Fathers write about not using the imagination,particularly in prayer or contemplation. How would that translate to imagi-native literature?

HERMAN: Like Lewis, the Fathers of the Church don’t romanticize man’simaginative faculty. In his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, St. Johnof Damascus describes the imagination without condemning or praising it.

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argue that it’s not Christian allegory at all!). Till We Have Faces is probablyhis most mature novel and is the one I most look forward to re-reading. It is a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, and in it, Lewis develops thehiddenness, mysteriousness, and sovereignty of God. It’s probably his mostprofound fiction.

RTE: It is difficult to think of his fiction without also thinking of Tolkien’sThe Lord of the Rings. Not only were Lewis and Tolkien friends, but theyread portions of their works-in-progress aloud to each other, and theCatholic Tolkien helped Lewis in his conversion to Christianity. Even so, themodern novel is a literary style which has only existed for a few centuries.How do you see fiction fitting into an Orthodox world-view, and Lewis’sworks in particular?

HERMAN: I think from an Orthodox perspective, it could be argued that the greatest writers of fiction were the realists, and in particular, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the Greek AlexanderPapadiamantes. Both were realists and refused toromanticize; they wrote about a world that wasreal, a world of joy and of tragedy. They didn’tromanticize the Church, they didn’t simplifyissues. They tried to provide an accurate pictureof both good and evil. By virtue of that, the truthshines through their works much more profound-ly and beautifully.

As regards the imaginative literature of Tolkien and Lewis, an Orthodoxperson might say that they are less than ideal as artistic forms, in the sameway that western religious paintings, although artistically masterpieces, areless ideal on a spiritual level than icons. At the same time, a Renaissancepainting of Christ is much more edifying than the distasteful religiousexhibits done by some modern artists.

In fact, there is a significant difference between Tolkien’s and Lewis’sviews of fantasy. They’ve been painted with the same brush, but Tolkien feltthat The Chronicles of Narnia were too allegorical. Tolkien’s objection toallegory was that if you put conscious meaning into a story, this meaning islimited by the author’s understanding. This destroys it as art and it hindersGod’s ability to speak to people through the story.


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J.R.R. Tolkien, 1972.

RTE: As soon as Lewis and Tolkien became popular, there was a rash of fantasy novels, many of them in several volumes. Often they didn’t hangtogether and, unfortunately, moved away from Lewis and Tolkien’s good-ness and nobility into a darker orbit.

HERMAN: As literature, Lewis’s science fiction trilogy doesn’t always holdtogether either, it’s more of a vehicle for his ideas. Nevertheless, we couldask, “Is there such a thing as a Christian science fiction novel, and if there is,what would that mean?” I’m not sure that Lewis asked that question, or if itbothered him. As an apologist, he felt (even if it was somewhat subcon-scious) that if works such as The War of the Worlds were popular, sciencefiction might be a way to reach people. “If they are already reading this stuff,how do I get into their world and respond to these ideas?” I’m quite sure thathe wouldn’t have put it in these terms and I should note that his attitude andapproach was a great deal more nuanced than I have presented it. That said,I think that, in general, this was definitely a factor in Lewis’s fiction, againconsciously or subconsciously. A good example of Lewis’s apologetic use ofscience fiction is in Out of the Silent Planet when he sends his characterRansom to Malacandra (Mars) in a rocket ship. Ransom is amazed at whathe experiences in space.

RTE: That in itself is a huge departure from other science fiction. Lewis sawthe heavens as full of light and angelic beings, as opposed to the usual dark,empty, or hostile space.

HERMAN: Yes. It was very interesting that he used outer space as an apolo-getic device to battle the modern atheistic cosmology, to talk about God’spresence in all of creation. He wanted to debunk modern prejudices thathad been created through science and popular literature. He also has aremarkable passage where he talks about the grotesque forms of life onother planets that have been created by science fiction writers:

His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient andmedieval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculateor crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings,slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman

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He says that imagination is a faculty of the unreasoning part of the soul thatis brought into action through the organs of sense.

Although they regard the imagination as an important part of man’sbeing, the Fathers also say that it can be used by the evil one to confuse anddeceive. Although their main concern is the danger of the imagination inprayer, this can also be applied to reading imaginative literature. Christiansneed to separate the wheat from the chaff, to consider what they read inlight of the Church’s teaching.

In his essay to young men on how they might derive profit from pagan literature, St. Basil the Great explains its usefulness for the soul: “…While itis through virtue that we must enter upon this life of ours and since muchhas been uttered in praise of virtue by the poets, much by historians andmuch more still by philosophers, we ought especially to apply ourselves tosuch literature.” Then he advises which historians and poets to read. He doesn’t simply say, “It’s all wonderful.” Certain things are better thanothers. Of course, this is a little different case because St. Basil was referringto a pre-Christian world.

RTE: As opposed to a Christian society that is re-inventing paganism?

HERMAN: Yes, they still had a lot of grace by virtue of searching for God, and their pagan literature was still innocent, a part of the search for God.Unlike classical literature, most modern literature doesn’t have a founda-tion of virtue. Knowing that Lewis was a realist regarding spiritual life validates his literature for me. Although he is creative and gives free rein to his imagination, he doesn’t romanticize the imagination. Like theFathers, he felt that the imagination is not a spiritual faculty. His literatureis essentially didactic; he is trying to teach, although he would not have putit like that.

RTE: If you put meaning into something, you must hope that people willcatch that meaning.

HERMAN: He did want his works to have meaning, but he wanted people tocome to God through them, for them to be an aid in experiencing God ratherthan a moral sermon. For instance, there is an obvious difference betweenThe Chronicles of Narnia and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan wrote a directallegory, with each character named for the vice or virtue he represented.


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there is one very fundamental difference. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a realmthat is completely detached from our world. It is totally imaginary. In Lewis’s Narnia, also, you have the backdrop of our world where the children come from, and then the completely imaginary Narnian worldwhere most of the story takes place. In neither case are human charactersglamorized because of their magical powers, which is precisely what happens with Harry Potter. Harry Potter lives in our world, and evenHogwarts Academy is theoretically somewhere in England.

So, there are some very clear problems here. First of all, you have a familiarsetting in our own world and time, which provides an element of realism to themind of a ten year-old who doesn’t have a spiritual foundation; I also believethere is a very real problem in creating a hero out of a young warlock. Thatdoesn’t happen in either The Lord of the Rings or in The Chronicles of Narnia.

RTE: How would you answer a reader who asks what the difference isbetween Tolkien’s Gandalf the Wizard and Harry Potter?

HERMAN: Gandalf is from this completely different realm, which we have nopossibility to enter, and he is not a mortal human being as are some of theother characters. With Tolkien there is no chance of a child thinking, “Thiscould be me.” There is a very clear problem in Rowling’s books, because agreat deal of the books’ appeal is that in our world there is both white magicand black magic, and a child can engage in them.

RTE: Also, Gandalf’s powers are rarely used; he protects and leads theFellowship primarily through his wits, knowledge, and experience, and, asyou say, the humans in the story never have any power they wouldn’t havein our own world. Tolkien himself once said, “In The Lord of the Rings theconflict is not basically about ‘freedom,’ though that is naturally involved. It is about God, and His sole right to divine honour.”5 That is a major differ-ence between the self-centered world of the Potter books and Middle Earth.

HERMAN: The same is true of The Chronicles of Narnia. The children do notuse magic themselves, and it is obvious that there is a right way and a wrongway of doing things. In The Last Battle, the children try to reenter Narniathrough the magic wardrobe in the country house. In other words, they tryto force their way in, but they are unsuccessful and in the end, Aslan

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intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world.

When Ransom arrives on Mars, he meets creatures that he discovers to bevery lovely once he overcomes the prejudices of his own culture.

RTE: They are not only lovely, but subservient to God. Lewis also uses thespace trilogy to alert readers to the danger of progressive amorality throughthe misuse of education and technology. He was one of the first Christianwriters to go after what is now a very common theme.

Magic and Imagination in Children’s Literature

HERMAN: Evil seems to have become more powerful today, and it spreadsfast with technology such as the Internet. The more access people have, themore likely they are to misuse it. I recently came across a feature on Yahoo!where you can see the most searched-for topics on any given day. On oneindex focusing on what children age 12 to 18 were looking for, the 12th mostpopular subject search was satanism.

RTE: Young people hunger for intense experience, but without models ofnobility and heroism, they look for something else to plunge into.

HERMAN: Yes, and this could be a problem for the wider public, with bookslike the Harry Potter series. For an Orthodox family consciously strugglingto live as Christians, if their child reads Harry Potter, he is probably notgoing to go searching for wizardry schools to learn to cast spells, but outsideof that context, it could be very problematic.

RTE: Although there have been many reviews comparing Harry Potter withLewis and Tolkien, I find them leagues apart.

HERMAN: Yes, in fact there are a few Orthodox writers who attempt to justifyRowling’s use of magic by discussing the difference between incantational andinvocational magic.

RTE: But practicing witchcraft in any form is forbidden to Christians.

HERMAN: Yes, and for those who justify the Potter books as being part of atradition that includes Lewis and Tolkien, the point should be made that


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5 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, HarperCollins, (paperback) 1995, pg. 243.

provides his own means. They do not have powers of their own. Also, thereis a much greater mental distance between the reader and Middle Earth orNarnia, than between the reader and Hogwarts Academy.

The whole business of the Harry Potter books is complicated by misinfor-mation that drifts around the Christian world. Some Orthodox have taken asfactual a quote Rowling supposedly made to The Onion.

RTE: The satirical paper out of Chicago?

HERMAN: Yes, the paper consists of spoofs and satire. The articles are veryconvincing, and if you didn’t know that the entire newspaper is a farce, youmight think it was real. They have her say things like, “Yes, I wrote the HarryPotter novels so as to initiate children into satanism.” Apparently this article made its way to Greece and was taken seriously by people who didn’trealize the nature of the paper. It created a terrible backlash.

On the other hand, one Orthodox writer (apparently) argues that Rowlinguses a lot of Christian imagery and is simply following this great tradition ofChristian mythology. He also argues that she is a great Christian writer whois secretly planting Christianity in the hearts of millions of people aroundthe world.

RTE: What would you say to that?

HERMAN: I suppose the first thing I would say is that I hope he is right…butI have my doubts. I haven’t read his book from cover to cover and I supposeit’s possible that some of the elements he sees in Rowling are there. He seems to be a well-read and thoughtful person. But, and I hate to say it,the idea seems naïve. Even if they are there, the great majority of people whoread it will have no idea that these esoteric Christian elements exist. Perhapsthe writer would counter that it makes no difference if you are aware of theChristian elements or not, that they sink in subconsciously.

In any case, if you read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,the Christianity is obvious, it hits you in the face. When I read Harry Potterand the Sorcerer’s Stone, the things this writer points out didn’t hit me atall, and I have studied theology and literature for a fair amount of time. Ifthere is Christian imagery there, it is pretty deeply buried. It is not so muchthat the Harry Potter novels don’t have any redeeming qualities. I would say

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Opposite: The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, where Lewis, Tolkien, and other members of“The Inklings” met weekly.

HERMAN: I’ve heard of Ms. Haigh’s book, but I haven’t actually read it, so Ican’t comment on it specifically. My initial feeling, however, is that she mightbe confusing the relation of the imagination to prayer and the relation of theimagination to the acquisition of knowledge. As I said earlier, it’s true that theFathers often seem to be critical of the imagination, but it is usually not theimagination per se, but the use of the imagination in prayer that they criti-cize. As I mentioned earlier, in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,St. John of Damascus provides a very objective definition of the imagination:“Imagination is a faculty of the unreasoning part of the soul. It is through theorgans of sense that it is brought into action, and it is spoken of as sensation.”And in St. Gregory Palamas’s Topics of Natural and Theological Science andOn the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts, he explainsone of the natural functions of the imagination: “When the intellectenthrones itself on the soul’s imaginative faculty and thereby becomes asso-ciated with the senses, it engenders a composite form of knowledge.” St.Gregory explains that the imagination is actually an important aspect of howhumans acquire knowledge. We use our imagination every time we view andinterpret anything we come into contact with. Christ used parables to teach,and many of the Fathers (in particular, St. Basil and St. Ambrose) refer to theimaginative literature of the pagans as being potentially useful in education.

At the same time, there is no question that imaginative literature can bedangerous, in the same way that all good things, when used inappropriately,can be dangerous. I certainly wouldn’t want to lump Lewis and Tolkien inwith Rowling, and, as I said, there are significant differences between Lewisand Tolkien themselves in their understanding of the imagination and imag-inative literature.

It seems that some people attack Lewis and Tolkien because they regardtheir works as attempts to create “Christian Art.” What happens, however, if we don’t judge whether or not their art is “Christian,” but whether or notit is “good” (beautiful, edifying, etc.) or bad (ugly, hedonistic, nihilistic)?This is the test that St. Paul asks us to make when he tells us to focus onthose things that are good, beautiful, and noble. Art is a vehicle for express-ing truth, but it is not the truth itself. Even icons are simply windows intoheaven; they are not heaven itself. Many modern westerners accord art andculture a spiritual dimension that it does not merit. Lewis discusses this, infact, and reacts against it. Art is not the same as prayer and we should notjudge it according to the same criteria.

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that one of the main problems is that their redeeming qualities always seemtainted by a lack of spiritual clarity: in both Lewis and Tolkien good and evilare very clearly delineated. I don’t feel Rowling has achieved this and itmakes her novels potentially dangerous. What the average reader is goingto be left with is a hero who is a warlock, and it’s almost inevitable that somechildren will be inspired by the wrong aspects of the Potter books.

RTE: A Russian woman recently told me that in her son’s second-gradeclass, the children have learned the “forbidden” magic spell from the HarryPotter books that “kills” an opponent instantly, and they spend recess waving sticks at each other and shouting these words. These are second-graders in Moscow.

HERMAN: This suggests a problem with the logic of those Orthodox advocating the Harry Potter novels as spiritually edifying and as covertevangelism. One of their arguments is that Rowling uses a great deal ofmedieval Christian symbolism in her novels. But what happens when thesenovels are translated into a completely foreign language and read by peopleof a completely foreign culture? If educated people who share the same lin-guistic and cultural background with Rowling are not aware of her apparentcovert Christian symbolism, how is someone from a completely differentcultural background going to grasp it? And if they aren’t grasping it, whatare they getting out of the novels?

RTE: A good antidote to Harry Potter are the early 20th-century books byE. Nesbitt, who wrote about children from our world receiving “wishes”from magic carpets, rings, birds and beasts, but in each instance, the delightof receiving magical wishes is counteracted by the unexpected results. Themagic is uncontrollable, as magic really is, and the children invariably findthemselves in very humorous and tangled situations that take a real effortto get out of. Lewis once said that Nesbitt was his favorite children’s writer.6

On the other side of the spectrum, I recently read an abstract titled,“Fairyland is Hell” by a Catholic author, Paula Haigh, who lumps Tolkien,Lewis and Rowling into the same pot and argues against all fantasy writingas unpatristic. Do you have any comments on this?


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6 E. Nesbitt’s books include: Five Children and It, The Wouldbegoods, The Phoenix and the Carpet, TheEnchanted Castle, The Treasure Seekers, The New Treasure Seekers, The Railway Children, The Book ofDragons

repentance,” but they might be left with an overall impression of Aslan, ofthe desire for a resurrection, the desire for good over evil, and the sense thatthere are moral choices to be made. These are the kinds of things that Lewisfelt were important and what he wanted people to take from his stories.

RTE: And now, how would you sum up Lewis?

HERMAN: Lewis, I think, has a great deal to teach us about living and struggling as Christians in the modern world. His integrity as a scholar, hisdedication to a life of prayer and the study of Scripture, and his ability tocombine the two, the spiritual and the secular, are qualities that we canadmire. Finally, however, the goodness of the tree is revealed through itsfruit. Not only does Lewis’s legacy live on in the hearts and minds of millionsof Orthodox and non-Orthodox Christians, but Lewis’s works themselvesattest to a profound understanding of Christian truth seldom found in thepost-schism West.

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RTE: In that same vein is a piece from the December 2006 issue of theRussian Orthodox magazine FOMA by rock singer and actor PetrMamonov, who has the leading role in “The Island,” a film about a northernRussian monastery now playing in cinemas throughout Russia. The quoterefers to the endless discussions about whether rock music is compatiblewith Orthodoxy:

How is it always put? That creative work per se – and especiallyrock and roll – is a demonic affair. I do not agree with this in principle. If you have talent, you must convey it, because burying atalent in the ground doesn't count. And as for forms... why do youhave to play a guitar softly, by candlelight? Metropolitan Anthony[Bloom] of Sourozh wrote: “As soon as an artist tries to turn hiswork, his skill, into an illustration of his faith, for the most part itbecomes wooden.” …Normal people, with intelligence and taste,just cannot react otherwise. So what then? Again MetropolitanAnthony: “If an artist is steeped in his faith, he does not need to check his inspiration against it, because they are not only intertwined, they make up a single whole.” So, believe, pray, rootout your sins, but do as your heart says! To the extent that you havegrown spiritually, you will deliver. But if you choose the theme“Dear, lovely God, glory to Thee!” but are yourself rotten, this is adual sin: you are confusing people and lying.

In regard to artistic expression, what do you think of the Narnia movie?

HERMAN: I was pleased, although I could have done without the“Hollywoodization” of the film. Some scenes were rewritten and altered soas to heighten the action and suspense, especially the scene with the wolvesat the waterfall where Peter thrusts his sword into the ice and the childrenfloat off as though it’s a surfboard. That said, there were one or two changesthey made which actually provided more Christian content to the story,which I was glad to see.

The important thing is that the sense of mythology, of truth, is there.Orthodox Christians would get a lot more out of it in that respect as, on anintellectual level, most people won’t think to themselves, “Aslan is askingthe children why they did that because he wants to encourage them to


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Orthodox Worldview and CS Lewis